August 30, 2015

Great time seeing the movie and catching up with good friend Giles. I was impressed with the way the screenwriters handled the potential for the movie to descend into silliness and farce. There were only a few times that I felt sorry for the actors having to deliver such goofy lines. But the sense of humor and obviously over-the-top story worked. The screenwriters, director, and actors pulled it off. Way to go!

We saw it at the Alamo, a place that, sadly, Erin and I haven’t gone to enough. To sit and watch a movie where you’re guaranteed to not have talkers or small screens in your face was nice. And sipping a Guinness in a comfortable chair really added to the experience.

July 4, 2015

Saw it tonight. It takes the throne of Best Pixar Movie in my lineup away from The Incredibles (with a close second of Finding Nemo). Inside Out was unbelievably good. By which I mean that many times throughout the movie I found myself thinking how?How are they able to do this? Weave so many different threads so beautifully and seamlessly together? Storytelling, lighting, detail, emotional punch. I left the theater feeling that if I worked at Pixar I would be profoundly proud of what we’d created. It really is a beautiful (and gut-wrenching) film. So glad I saw it in the theater.

January 14, 2015

“Ortiz pitched the Colonel a plan as if he were pitching a commercial to Heinz or Coca-Cola. The Colonel stroked his chin. Espejo liked the code idea, because he knew that many soldiers — especially in the communications departments — were taught Morse code in their basic training. Furthermore, Espejo reasoned, ‘The FARC were peasants from the fields, they wouldn’t know [Morse].’ It was a longshot, but if the team could disguise the telltale dot-dot-dash signals in a song, there was a chance the soldiers would hear the message.”

November 30, 2013

what these four young men represent is a challenge to the common portrayal of male friendship in our popular culture. It is difficult to find, especially on television, an example of male friendship (outside of the military or law enforcement) that is neither transactional nor idiotic. For cheap beer, it’s the wingman trope. In sitcoms, it’s stupid men doing stupid things in stupid attempts at liberation from wives or girlfriends. Male friendships, we’re taught, are about finding or fleeing women; they are not valuable in themselves.

October 21, 2013

Now that the government shutdown is over, the MSM is beginning to increase its coverage of what, so far, looks like a systemic failure of the ACA in its early rollout. Negative coverage — of how hard it is to enroll, how badly the program as a whole is working, how unpopular it remains — will likely make all but the most motivated customers stay away. Those customers will be exactly the ones Obamacare does not need: customers with expensive pre-existing conditions whose need for insurance is so dire that they will fight through any and all obstacles to get enrolled.

All told, we wonder if Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and President Obama are as happy today about Obamacare as they were on the day the law was passed. Beyond that, everything that has happened since passage has confirmed our view that far from solving the problems facing American health care, this poorly drafted, poorly executed system makes the problem of health care reform both more urgent and more difficult.

So not only was the legislation contrary to the best traditions of Americanism (making someone buy a product just because they live and breathe is anything but liberty), it was also poorly written abysmally executed. To everyone who was in favor of this, congratulations…

September 30, 2013

“So when CraveOnline cornered J.J. Abrams on the red carpet for the Star Trek Into Darkness Blu-ray release party, we had to ask him… What’s up with those lens flares? His answer may be the most surprising thing he’s done in years. He apologized.

‘I know I get a lot of grief for that,’ says Abrams. ‘But I’ll tell you, there are times when I’m working on a shot, I think, ‘Oh this would be really cool… with a lens flare.’ But I know it’s too much, and I apologize. I’m so aware of it now. I was showing my wife an early cut of Star Trek Into Darkness and there was this one scene where she was literally like, ‘I just can’t see what’s going on. I don’t understand what that is.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I went too nuts on this.” ‘This is how stupid it was,’ J.J. Abrams added. ‘I actually had to use ILM [Industrial Light & Magic] to remove lens flare in a couple of shots, which is, I know, moronic. But I think admitting you’re an addict is the first step towards recovery.'”

September 25, 2013

“Saltzberg also reviews scripts in progress. They arrive with unfinished dialogue and brackets reading, ‘Insert Science Here.’ He fills in the blanks, as in an episode where Dr. Sheldon Cooper, a puffed-up theoretical physicist, keeps bumming rides from a neighbor.

‘She couldn’t understand why Sheldon never got a driver’s license,’ Saltzberg explains. When she asks what Sheldon was doing at age 16, when everyone else was learning to drive, he answers, as per Saltzberg, ‘Examining perturbative amplitudes in N=4 supersymmetric theories, leading to a reexamination of the ultraviolet properties of multiloop N=8 supergravity, using modern twistor theory.’

As it happens, that’s ‘a real, important project that one of my friends is working on,’ Saltzberg says.”

July 19, 2013

Field and McKee offered the screenwriter’s equivalent of cooking tips from your grandmother—general tips and tricks to guide your process. Snyder, on the other hand, offers a detailed recipe with step-by-step instructions.

Each of the 15 beats is attached to a specific page number or set of pages. And Snyder makes it clear that each of these moments is a must-have in a well-structured screenplay. The page counts don’t need to be followed strictly, Snyder says, but it’s important to get the proportions fairly close

Watching poorly executed movies with Snyder’s formula in mind can become a tiresome and repetitive slog. How many times can you watch a young man struggle with his problems, gain new power, then save the world? It’s enough to make you wonder: Is overreliance on Snyder’s story formula killing movies?

The previews before Monster’s University were so tiresomely similar that I leaned over to Erin and actually said “are these for the same movie?”. Structure is good, but over reliance on structure eventually leads to… what? Your audience turning on you? The creation of new structures? Not sure, but in the meantime it can make watching some entertainment pretty bland.